**Based on the celebrated PBS television series about the men and women
who lived through the cataclysmic trial of our nationhood--the complete
text of the magisterial illustrated work of history that The New York
Times hailed as "a treasure for the eye and mind."
**
"The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what
we became, good and bad things.... It was the crossroads of our being,
and it was a hell of a crossroads: the suffering, the enormous tragedy
of the whole thing." --Shelby Foote, from The Civil War
Now Geoffrey Ward's magisterial work of history is available in a
text-only edition that interweaves the author's narrative with the
voices of the men and women who lived through the cataclysmic trial of
our nationhood: not just Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Robert
E. Lee, but genteel Southern ladies and escaped slaves, cavalry officers
and common foot soldiers who fought in Yankee blue and Rebel gray.
The Civil War also includes essays by our most distinguished
historians of the era: Don E. Fehrenbacher, on the war's origins;
Barbara J. Fields, on the freeing of the slaves; Shelby Foote, on the
war's soldiers and commanders; James M. McPherson, on the political
dimensions of the struggle; and C. Vann Woodward, assessing the America
that emerged from the war's ashes.